Q: Why did you decide to write a book about the history of
the birth control pill, and how did you choose to focus on those particular
four people?

A: There’s a long story behind how I came to this topic,
which you can read here if you want the whole deal.

The short answer is that I heard a rabbi say more than a
decade ago that he considered the birth-control one of—if not THE—most
important inventions of the twentieth century, and after I thought it about a
bit, it struck me as strange that I knew nothing of how it was invented.

Upon further reflection, it struck me as even more strange
that anyone would invent a pill designed to liberate women when it was men who
controlled all of science, business and government in the 1950s and when birth
control was essentially illegal.

That got my curiosity going. When I began looking into it, I
found these great characters at the heart of the story, all of them outsiders,
rebels, dreamers, all of them taking on extraordinary risks to accomplish
something that many considered impossible.

Choosing these four particular protagonists—Margaret Sanger,
Gregory Pincus, Katharine McCormick, and John Rock—was not particularly
difficult. Other people played important roles, but these four stood out. Take
away any one of them, and there is no pill.

Also, each of these four truly qualified as crusaders. Each
of them understood that they were essentially challenging orthodoxy and trying
to unleash forces that would change the world.

Q: In the book, you write, “Science would do what the law so
far had not; it would give women the chance to become equal partners with men.
This was the technology Sanger had been seeking all her life.” Do you think
Margaret Sanger, who died less than a decade after the pill became available,
would have been satisfied with the societal changes sparked by the pill in the
decades after her death?

A: Sanger would have been pleased, I think, to see that the
pill accomplished so much of what she’d hoped it would. It allowed men and women
to enjoy more sex without fear of pregnancy. It gave women opportunities they
might never have had. It dramatically reduced maternal and infant deaths. The
list goes on and on.

But of course she could not have foreseen all its
complicated effects. I think she’d be disappointed that it wasn’t more help in
fighting population growth in developing countries. And I think she’d be
horrified that it didn’t settle for once and for all the question of whether
women should have the freedom and power to control their own bodies and make
their own choices about reproduction.

Q: You write of John Rock’s decision to work on the pill,
“Was he going to commit to a project that would put him in direct opposition to
the Catholic Church, the same church to which he had been devoted since
boyhood?” How was Rock able to handle this opposition?

A: Over time, Dr. Rock became increasingly convinced that he
was right and the Catholic Church was wrong about birth control. He believed
married couples should be encouraged to enjoy sex even when they don’t want
children. He believed women should have access to safe and effective
contraception and that women should be entitled to have abortions when
pregnancy threatened their health.

He also believed that by stating these opinions publicly and
attracting support from Catholics he could persuade the Church to change its
rules. He was wrong, of course, and it turned out to be one of the great
disappointments of his life.

Q: How did this pill become “The Pill,” not needing further
identification?

A: As I say in the book, there’s no such thing as The Car or
The TV. But The Pill needed no name because it was so special, so different
from anything that had come before, and so quickly and stunningly revolutionary
in nature. There had never been a medicine for healthy people before. There had
never been a method of birth-control so simple and so effective before.

Of course, another reason the name caught on may be that
women were unsure how to describe what they wanted or else they were a little
embarrassed when they went to see their doctors for the first time, so they refrained
using the terms “birth control” and “contraceptive” and instead simply said
they were interested in “The Pill.”

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My next book is the biography of Muhammad Ali. Although
I’m not so comfortable with braggadocio as my subject, I have to say that I think
it’s going to be the greatest.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).